Motivational Factors Influencing Teaching as a Career Choice: Development and Validation of the FIT-Choice Scale

The authors apply current influential models from the motivational literature to develop the comprehensive factors influencing teaching choice (FIT-Choice) scale, to measure factors influencing the choice to teach for beginning preservice teacher education candidates. They validate the scale using 2 large cohorts (N = 488; 652) and describe the factors that teacher education candidates identified as most important in their decision to teach. Furthermore, the authors examine longitudinal relationships for participants who have now completed their teaching qualification (N = 294) to determine how entry motivations relate to exit levels of teaching engagement and professional development aspirations. The study…